Excellent idea! There's some ideas about buying it back but EA is dragging their feet. They supposedly have some ideas somewhere but it'll take a few more months (years?) until they might let us know about it (check the forum about it).

The closest to a liaison to EA is spadequack. He reads the forums and/or can be contacted via a private game. He fixes acute bugs when they pop up. But has no direct access to the source code afaiu.

He also said that one of the original programmers (alex I think) - who has been hired by EA, together with weewar, so to say - had some "ideas" with respect to weewar. But alex is currently on paternity leave (although that's a long paternity leave it seems to me) so until he's back there's nothing to expect from EA.

Other idea is to rewrite weewar as openwar (open source version). Search the forums for more about it. Any help there is appreciated.

Alex is back from paternity leave now, but plans regarding Weewar are still moving really slowly at EA. It is just not high enough of a priority for the necessary higher up people to allocate much time to.

spadequack wrote:Alex is back from paternity leave now, but plans regarding Weewar are still moving really slowly at EA. It is just not high enough of a priority for the necessary higher up people to allocate much time to.

Then why don't they sell it? What sort of price would they be looking for weewar?
Like i mentionned before, there are no ads or member costs so i don't even see why they're holding onto it.
Sell it to us!

I and others have pitched that to them, but when is the last time that you heard a big company like EA, Blizzard/Activision, or Ubisoft sell one of their low-profile games, either to another company or to the game's community? The latter situation is very much unheard of and may not have even ever happened. It would be bad for PR, for one. Mostly though, if EA wanted to sell Weewar, the price would have to be high enough that it merits the attention from all of the EA people that need to be involved and is worth the time and effort for them to tackle the many legal and financial obstacles associated with such an uncommon sale. Frankly, I don't think that Weewar is worth enough in its current state for someone to pitch a price high enough to make heads turn, so we're kind of stuck. Weewar has a lot of potential, but turning that potential into reality requires a team of skilled programmers and designers (or many, many unskilled contributors), and that costs even more money and effort past the initial buy.

In an ideal world, EA would realize that Weewar would now be better off in the hands of its community and just give it away as a philanthropic donation. But I'd say that administrative red tape, limited people resources at EA, and company pride will keep that from becoming reality, at least in the near future. I still have hope, but my optimism wanes with each new effort I help push through to them.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 07/02/2012 21:09:10

EA does have a bad rep but that doesn't stop people buying tiger woods 2057 or battlefield 73, so a bad rep hardly even matters to them.

With regards to hosting cost, someone would have to pay but I'm not convinced it would be that high. the flash client is the biggest bloat, I guess it depends on how many browsers are caching it, or downloading it every time.

The key issue is do you want to pay the same stagnant game forever at no cost or do you want innovation. If you're happy with the status quo then this is the best situation. If you want more units, bug fixes, new features then this is a horrible solution.